The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (4 page)

When someone decides to go famous, they give up such privilege. But a writer doesn't have to do that. Writers can have their books read by a lot of people, they can have their names be known, yet stay unrecognized everywhere. Actors can't. Newscasters can't. Writers can.

If ever I became a Personality, would I be sorry? I knew instantly: Yes. Some other lifetime, perhaps, I had tried being famous. It is not exciting, it is not attractive, that life warned; go on television and you will regret it.

There was the beacon. The green-glass-white-glass spot-

light that turns round by night to mark the airport. Perking down final approach flew an Aeronca Champion, & 1946 two-seat paint-and-fabric trainer with a tailwheel at the back instead of a nosewheel in front. I liked the airport without having seen it yet, just from the Champ in the pattern.

What would getting to be slightly famous do to the search for my love? The first answer shot by so fast I never saw the blur: Kill it. You'll never know whether she loves you or your money. Richard. Listen. If you want to find her, do not, ever, become a celebrity, of any kind.

All of that in less time than a breath, and less remembered.

The second answer made so much sense that it was the only one I heard. My bright lovely soulmate, she wasn't driving town to town looking for some guy in a cow-pasture selling biplane rides. My chances of finding her, won't they improve when she knows I exist? Here's a special opportunity, come coincidentally at the moment I need to meet her!

And surely coincidence will lead my forevermate to see the right television show, at the right time, it'll show us how to meet. Then public recognition will fade away. Hide out for a week in Red Oak, Iowa, or Estrella Sailport in the desert south of Phoenix, and I'll get my privacy back and I'll have found her, too! Will that be so bad?

I opened the door to the airport office.

"Hi," she said. "What can we do for you today?" She was writing invoices at the counter, and she had a dazzling smile.

Between the smile and the question, she stopped my hello; I didn't know what to say.

How could I tell her that I was an insider, that the airport

ASt

and the beacon and the hangar and the Aeronca and even the aeronautical custom of a friendly hi after you land are part of my life, that they had been for a long time and they were slipping now, changing because of what I had done, and I wasn't quite sure I wanted them to change because I knew them and they were my only home on earth?

What could she do? Remind me that home is whatever we know and love, that home is with us wherever we choose to be? Tell me that she knows the one I'm looking for, or that a fellow in a white-and-gold Travel Air landed an hour ago and left a woman's name and address for me? Suggest plans wisely to manage one million four hundred thousand dollars? What could she do for me?

"Don't know quite what you can do," I said. "I'm a little lost, I guess. Are there any old airplanes in the hangar?"

"Jill Handley's Porterfield is out there, that's pretty old. Chet Davidson's Tiger Moth. Morris Jackson has a Waco, but he keeps that locked in a T-hangar. . . ." She laughed. "The Champs are getting pretty old. Are you looking for an Aeronca Champ?"

"It's one of the best airplanes in the history of the world," I said.

Her eyes widened. "No, I was kidding! I don't think Miss Reed would sell the Champs, ever."

I must have sounded like a buyer. Can people sense when a stranger has a million dollars?

She went on with the invoices, and I noticed her wedding ring, woven gold.

"Is it OK to look in the hangar for a minute?"

"Sure," she smiled. "Chefs the mechanic, he should be back there somewhere if he's not across the street for lunch

"Thank you."

I walked down a hall and opened the door into the hangar. It was home, all right. A factory-red-and-cream Cessna 172 in for its annual inspection: engine-cowlings off, spark plugs out, oil in the midst of a change. A Beech Bonanza, silver with a blue stripe down its side, perched delicately on tall yellow jacks for its landing-gear retraction test. Assorted lightplanes, I knew them all. Stories they had to tell, stories I could tell them back. A quiet hangar has the same soft tension as a deep-forest glade ... a stranger senses eyes watching, action suspended, life holding its breath.

There was a big Grumman Widgeon amphibian there, with two 300-horsepower radial engines, the new one-piece windscreen, mirrors on the wingtip floats so the pilot can check that the wheels are up before landing on the water. When one landed in the bay with its wheels down, the splash of that landing sold a great number of little mirrors to amphibian pilots.

I stood by the Widge and looked into the cockpit, my hands folded respectfully behind me. No one in aviation likes strangers to touch their airplanes without permission- not so much because the airplanes could be damaged as because it is unjustified familiarity, as though a curious stranger might walk by and touch one's wife, to see what she feels like.

Way back by the hangar door was the Tiger Moth, its upper wing standing out above the other airplanes like a friend's handkerchief waved above a crowd. The wing was painted the colors of Shimoda's airplane, it was painted white and gold! The closer I came, threading my way through the labyrinth of wings and tails and shop equipment, the more I was struck with the color of that machine.

The history that's been lived in de Havilland Moths! Men and women who were heroes to me had flown Tiger Moths and Gypsy Moths and Fox Moths from England all around the earth. Amy Lawrence, David Garnett, Francis Chiches-ter, Constantine Shak Lin, Nevil Shute himself-those names and the adventures they'd had, tugged me to the side of the Moth. What a pretty little biplane! All white, gold chevrons ten inches wide, vees pointing forward like arrowheads turning to angled gold stripes all the way out the wings and horizontal stabilizer.

There the ignition switches on the outside of the airplane, sure enough, and if it were a faithful restoration . . . yes, on the floor of the cockpit, a monster British military compass! I could hardly keep my hands behind my back, it was so handsome a machine. Now the rudder pedals should be fitted with . . .

"You like that airplane, do you?"

I nearly cried out, he startled me so. The man had been standing there half a minute, wiping oil from his hands on a shop towel and watching me inspect his Moth.

"Like it?" I said, "It's beautiful!"

"Thank you. She's been finished a year now, rebuilt her from the wheels up."

I looked closely at the fabric . . . there was a haze of texture, showing through the paint.

"Looks like Ceconite," I said. "Nice job." That would be all the introduction we'd need; one doesn't learn in a day how to tell the difference between Grade-A cotton and Ceconite dacron cloth on old airplanes. "And where did you find the compass?"

He smiled, happy I'd noticed. "Would you believe that I found that in a second-hand store in Dothan, Alabama?

Genuine Royal Air Force compass, 1942. Seven dollars and fifty cents. You tell me how it got there, but I'll tell you I got it out!"

We walked around the Moth, me listening while he talked, and as we did I knew I was clinging to my past, to the known and therefore simple life of flight. Had I been too impulsive, selling the Fleet and chopping the ropes of my yesterdays to go searching for an unknown love? There in the hangar, it was as if my world had become a museum, or an old photograph; a raft cut adrift and floating softly away, slowly into history. . . .

I shook my head, frowned, interrupted the mechanic.

"Is the Moth for sale, Chet?"

He didn't take me seriously. "Every airplane's for sale. Like they say, it's a matter of price. I'm more a builder than a flyer, but I'd want an awful lot of money to sell the Moth, I tell you."

I squatted down and looked beneath the airplane. There was not a trace of oil on the cowling.

Rebuilt a year ago by an aircraft mechanic, I thought, hangared ever since. The Moth was a special find, indeed. I had never for a minute intended to stop flying. I could fly clear across the country, in the Moth. I could fly this airplane to the television interviews, and along the way, I might find my soulmate!

I set my bedroll on the floor for a cushion. It crackled when I sat on it. "How much money is a lot of money if it's cash?"

Chet Davidson went to lunch an hour and a half late. I took the Moth logbooks and manuals with me to the oflice.

"Excuse me, ma'am. You have a telephone, don't you?"

"Sure. Local call?"

•"No."

"Pay phone's just outside the door, sir." "Thank you. You sure have a sweet smile." "Thank you, sir!" A nice custom, wedding-rings. I called Eleanor in New York and told her I'd do the television.

SIX

. HERE'S LEARNINGFUL serenity, comes from sleeping under airplane-wings in country fields: stars and rain and wind color dreams real. Hotels, I found neither educating nor serene.

There's proper balanced nourishment, mixing panbread-flour and streamwater in the civilized wilderness of farmland America. Wolfing peanuts in taxicabs careening toward television studios is not so well-balanced.

There's a proud hurray, when passengers step unharmed from an old two-winger back on the ground again, fear of heights turned to victory. TV-talk forced between paid commercials and the tick of a second-hand, it lacks the same breath of triumph shared.

But she's worth hotels and peanuts and eye-on-the-time interviews, my elusive soulmate, and meet her I would, if I

kept moving, watching, searching through studios in many downtowns.

It did not occur to me to doubt her existing, because I saw almost-hers all about me. I knew from barnstorming that America was pioneered by remarkably attractive women, for their daughters number millions today. A gypsy passing through, I knew them only as lovely customers, sweetly pleasant to watch for the space of a biplane-ride.

My words with them had been practical: The airplane is safer than it looks. If you'll tie your hair with a ribbon before we take off, ma'am, it'll be easier to brush after we land. Yes, it's that windy-ten minutes, after all, in an open cockpit at eighty miles per hour. Thank you. That" will be three dollars, please. You're welcome! I liked the ride, too.

Was it the talk-shows, was it the success of the book, was it my new bank account, or was it simply that I was no longer flying without stop? All at once I was meeting attractive women as never I had before. Intent on my search, I met each of them through a prism of hope: she was the one until she proved me wrong.

Charlene, a television model, might have been my soulmate save that she was too pretty. Invisible flaws in her mirror image reminded her that the Business is cruel, only a few years left to earn a retirement, to save for retraining. We could talk about something else, but not for long. Always she came back to the Business. Contracts, travel, money, agents. It was her way of saying she was frightened, and couldn't think her way out of the murderous silvered glass.

Jaynie had no fear. Jaynie loved parties, she loved drinking. Charming as a sunrise, she clouded and sighed when she found I didn't know where the action was.

Jacqueline neither drank nor partied. Quick and bright by

nature, she couldn't take the brightness for true. "High-school dropout," she said, "not a diploma to my name." Without a diploma, a person can't be educated, can she, and without degrees, a person's got to take what comes and hang on, hang on to the security of cocktail-serving no matter how it scrapes her mind. It's good money, she said. I don't have an education. I had to drop out of school, you understand.

Lianne cared not a whit for degrees, or for jobs. She wanted to be married, and the best way to be married was to be seen with me so that her ex-husband would turn jealous and want her again. Up from jealousy would come happiness.

Tamara loved money, and so dazzling was she in her way that she was a fine woman for the price. An artist's-model face, a mind that calculated even while she laughed. Well-read, well-traveled, multi-lingual. Her ex-husband was an investment broker, and now Tamara wanted to start her own broker's shop. A hundred thousand dollars would be enough to get her business off the ground. Just a hundred thousand, Richard, can you help me?

If only, I thought. If only I could find a woman with Charlene's face but with Lianne's body, and Jacqueline's gifts and Jaynie's charm and Tamara's cool poise-there I'd be looking at a soulmate, wouldn't I?

Trouble was that Charlene's face had Charlene's fears, and Lianne's body had Lianne's troubles. Each new meeting was intriguing, but after a day the colors turned dull, intrigue vanished in the forest of ideas that we didn't share. We were pie-slices for each other, incomplete.

Is there no woman, I thought at last, who can't prove in a day that she's not the one I'm looking for? Most of the ones

I was finding had difficult pasts, most were overwhelmed with problems and looking for help, most needed more money than they had on hand. We allowed for our quirks and flaws and, just-met, untested, we Called each other friends. It was a colorless kaleidoscope, every bit as changing and as grey as it sounds.

By the time television tired of me, I had bought a short-wing, big-engine biplane to be company for the Moth. I practiced arduously, and later began flying acrobatic performances for hire.

Thousands of people crowd summer airshows, I thought, and if I can't find her on television, perhaps I can find her at an airshow.

I met Katherine after my third performance, in Lake Wales, Florida. She emerged from the crowd around the airplane as though she were an old friend. Smiled a subtle intimate smile, cool and close as could be.

Her eyes were steady level calm even in the glare of bright noon. Long dark hair, dark green eyes. The darker our eyes, it is said, the less we're affected by sunbright.

"Looks like fun," she said, nodding to the biplane, oblivious to the noise and the crowd.

"Beats getting crushed to death by boredom," I said. "With the right airplane, you can escape an awful lot of boredom."